Brian Callahan had a 4-19 record as Tennessee’s head coach when the Titans fired him on Monday.
Callahan was not alone owning such a horrendous .174 winning percentage these past two NFL seasons. He had company.
The Cleveland Browns‘ Kevin Stefanski has an identical 4-19 record so far in the 2024-25 seasons. And the Giants’ Brian Daboll is close behind at 5-18 (.217).
None of the other teams that picked in the top seven of April’s NFL Draft qualify because the Patriots, Jaguars, Raiders and Jets already fired their coaches last January.
That’s why Daboll’s win over the Philadelphia Eagles last Thursday was so important. It’s also why the Giants head coach pulled the plug on Russell Wilson at 0-3 to start rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart and why Daboll needs to keep the arrow pointing up Sunday at Denver.
When the Titans fired Callahan, Tennessee president of football operations Chad Brinker said: “While we are committed to a patient and strategic plan to build a sustainable, winning football program, we have not demonstrated sufficient growth.”
Translation: We didn’t expect this Titans team to be good this season, but we needed to see some signs of progress. Anything. Anything at all.
That’s where Daboll’s job security was after losing the Chiefs on Sunday Night Football in Week 3 to fall to 0-3, and it’s the same shaky ground he stood on after falling to the Saints in embarrassing fashion in Week 5 to slip to 1-4.
The constant losing and lack of progress was coming close to becoming too much to stomach even for Giants ownership, which had bent over backwards to retain this staff — and especially this coach — after going 9-25 between their 2024 season (6-11) and their awful 2025 centennial campaign (3-14).
That’s why Daboll had to make the quarterback change to Dart:
He had to show progress. He had to demonstrate sufficient growth. He had to win.
And making the change, Dart was his last hope to accomplish all three.
So far, the rookie quarterback has made the embattled fourth-year head coach look good for putting his trust in Dart.
The Giants have scored a touchdown on the opening drive of all three of Dart’s starts. They’ve scored back-to-back touchdowns on the first two drives of their last two games against the Saints and Eagles.
And they’ve gone 2-1 with Dart at quarterback to reset the season, for now, as they head to Denver to take on Sean Payton’s 4-2 Broncos.
Daboll was the driving force behind shifting the Giants’ quarterback scouting process from Shedeur Sanders to Dart, too, in addition to making the call to start Dart so early in the season.
So the Vegas odds show he has significantly altered his chances of sticking around in New York, improving to +1000 odds to be the next NFL head coach fired.
The Dolphins’ Mike McDaniel (-150) is the favorite, per sportsbetting.ag, followed by the Cardinals’ Jonathan Gannon (+200), the Jets’ fast-rising Aaron Glenn (+400) — whose odds skyrocketed from +1200 to +400 in the last 24 hours — then Stefanski (+400) and Daboll sitting at a safe and distant fifth.
So the key now for Daboll is to keep his foot on the gas, keep winning and avoid doing anything that will undercut his recent success.
That’s easier said than done, though.
Daboll couldn’t even get out of the Giants’ upset of Philly without getting himself in trouble again.
The NFL and players’ union are conducting a joint investigation of Daboll’s and the Giants’ violation of the league’s concussion protocol while Dart was being evaluated in the blue medical tent during last Thursday’s game.
The NFL did not respond to a request for comment on the status of the investigation on Wednesday morning.
A hefty fine is expected, and the team could even be in jeopardy of losing a draft pick in a worst-case scenario, according to ProFootballTalk.
That is not becoming behavior of an NFL head coach or of the leader of a team and franchise that is trying hard to be taken seriously again after years of being a laughingstock.
Still, NFL owners measure success by wins and losses, by whether their team is ascending or descending, efficient or incompetent, competitive or irrelevant.
The Giants under Joe Schoen and Daboll too often have been the latter half of those equations, but they straddled the line once Dart entered the lineup. And now there is hope they’ve turned a corner.
That is what progress looks like, if it continues. That’s why Daboll played Dart, and that’s why it’s so important that he beat the Eagles.
He had to.
